Monday, December 19, 2016

Your Semi-Regular Reminders

Dallas was never going to bench Dak Prescott for Tony Romo. Ever. The whole flap was deliberately cooked up to keep the Cowboys in the news and keep Romo's trade value up.

Bowl season record doesn't mean diddly. Teams go into bowls often playing without their best players (See: McCaffery, Christian). Successful mid-majors often go into bowls without their coach - I'm pretty sure more than half of the AAC teams going bowling this year lost their coaches after the regular season - because he's been picked up by a Power 5 school. Low-achieving Power 5 schools are often without their coaches because they've been fired. Some teams are demotivated by the bowl game they ended up in. Some teams are hyper-motivated because of same. All it boils down to is this - bowl season has only a faint resemblance to the regular season, and any attempt to read the tea leaves of bowl season performance is futile.

It's hard not to sympathize with Nerlens Noel. Two years ago, he was the only Sixers who looked like he had an actual pulse. Then the Sixers started activating the rest of their center horde and Noel got hurt and other stuff happened, and now Noel's got a rep as a malcontent and he's out of the rotation, whatever that means on a team that moves its best player to his second best position to get Jah Okafor on the court. That being said, if Noel does want out - and all signs point to OH GOD YES GET ME OUT OF HERE - he'd be doing himself a favor by clamming up, playing well in the minutes he gets, and elevating his trade value so someone makes an offer the Sixers - who have handled this with the grace of a miniatures painter wearing Hulk Hands - feel they can accept. Right now, everyone loses.

Any analysis I've seen over whether Michigan State is in trouble tournament-wise leaves out one key fact - they're Michigan State and of course they'll get the benefit of the doubt over a mid-major or even an off-brand high major. That is how these things have always worked. It is how they will always work. And come March, MSU will be in the tournament again.

It really doesn't matter if the NFL is specifically letting Cam Newton get clobbered or if it's letting every QB get clobbered. The end result is the same - Newton, one of the game's transcendent talents and personalities, is getting his bell rung like he's scenery in the Hunchback of Notre Dame. A few more games with helmet-to-helmet hits like the one he took tonight and he's going to be so concussed he thinks he's late-career Troy Aikman. And that would be a shame for anyone who likes watching him play, which should mean pretty much everyone.

The Colorado Rockies have confused everyone by signing SS/OF Ian Desmond to a huge contract...to play first base, which he doesn't necessarily have the stick for and has never played. Then they went out and signed an average, aging reliever to a three year deal. A lot of people are saying they don't have a plan. This is not correct. They do have a plan. It's just not a good one.

Hockey shoot-outs are still stupid. Any rules change where you say "let's make this game that is not soccer more like soccer" is a bad idea. Also, deciding your games on a mechanic that is not your core gameplay mechanic is bad design, and would get you mocked at GDC.